Are the loudness wars fake so record companies can destroy the music?

So the music industry is in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to destroy music's healing powers so the pharmaceutical companies can sell more antidepressants. Where did you discover this stunning bit of news, Sam?

@cleeds Please do not confuse me with facts.......;-)

But I am confused now. So help me out. Seriously, I'm trying to understand.

A piece of music gets DR compressed. That means the range of lowest to highest volume is narrowed. In general this leads to an overall increase in loudness.

This makes the quiet bits closer to the louder bits. This helps with low end devices and to overcome ambient noise.

But when played through most iPhones the volume is normalized which basically means the volume is decreased relative to non-compressed songs. So when it is normalized those quieter bits are made quieter.

That would seem to defeat to a large extent the desired effect of compression.

I understand that the compression makes the quiet bits louder _relative_ to the louder bits but if all of it is 'turned down' by normalization then the quieter bits are turned down too.

What have I got wrong here?

Normalization has nothing at all to do with this. A recording with very limited dynamic range will sound "louder" than one with a wide dynamic range. It will sound that way even when "normalized" because its average volume is higher.

If you’re on a noisy subway, its easy for quiet passages on a wide DR recording to get lost beneath the ambient noise level of the subway car. Whether that signal was normalized or not has absolutely no bearing on it.

Do you think AC/DC tends to sound louder than a string quartet?

The quiet passages just get lost on phone/ earbuds so they boost it up, reduce the dynamics range so it all sounds nearly the same level.

WE KNOW it's wrong but to the average consumer it works for them.

From way back when in this thread..........

Sam here and the hypersonic effect is a proven fact and you can run your own test like i did and prove it to yourself. Why did the big pharmaceutical companies spend millions on bogus university research studies claiming they could not reproduce the hypersonic effect in there own independent test and to this very day if you do a google search you will find one negative story after another. Why would big pharma care about a little research paper published out of japan in 1999 involving music to the point where 20 years later there still publishing negative storys about the hypersonic effect? perhaps they no something they don't want us to know?